Bøger af Robert Coles

Pursuing Alexander Pushkin is the story of a scholar/poet whose life and work was shaped significantly by the Russian writer, Alexander Pushkin. Robert Coles' memoir begins with his student years at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he discovered Pushkin during the Black Arts Movement in the early 1970s. Coles describes how Pushkin's African race pride and literary achievements influenced his own work and gave him much-needed inspiration to keep writing. Thereafter, Coles details how Pushkin, despite his Russian background, shares an existential consciousness with African American people. Eventually this led Coles to travel to Russia, numerous times, to trace this connection further. In other words, Pushkin's experience of otherness and racial difference in Russian high society led him to better understand the suffering of Russian people, mostly serfs, and other oppressed groups. Pushkin's universalism, his internationally recognized genius, grew from having both an African and Russian heritage. 'In a captivating journey of self-discovery, Coles bridges African American and Russian heritage through the life and works of his literary hero, Alexander Pushkin. With profound dedication, Coles delves into Pushkin's legacy, uncovering shared struggles and universal connections across continents and time.'- Tammy Letherer, author of The Buddha at My Table.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe question is more relevant now than ever before: what makes someone a moral person?Child psychiatrist and Harvard professor Robert Coles has dedicated much of his life to exemplifying, teaching, and writing about the moral life. Here, Coles illuminates the ways in which children become moral or not so moral adults, drawing on case studies, talks with parents, visits to nurseries and classrooms, and interviews with children. No subject could be more important and more timely-for all Americans, but especially for parents. In the tradition of such bestsellers as Cultural Literacy and Emotional Intelligence, The Moral Intelligence of Children identifies a new type of intelligence essential for success and fulfillment in life. It will be used by parents and teachers for years to come as the authoritative guide to children's moral development.

"Lives We Carry with Us" gathers together for the first time a diverse cross section of Coles's profiles, originally published in our premier magazines over the span of five decades but never before collected in book form. Depicting the famous, the lesser known, and the unknown, the profiles here include portraits of James Agee, Dorothy Day, Erik Erikson, Dorothea Lange, Walker Percy, Bruce Springsteen, Simone Weil, and William Carlos Williams among others. Coles has chosen figures whom he considers his guardian spirits--individuals who shaped, challenged, and inspired one of the great moral voices of our era. Profiles include: James Rufus Agee (1909 - 1955) was was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. He was the author of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (to which he contributed the text and Walker Evans contributed the photographs) which grew out of an assignment the two men accepted in 1936 to produce a magazine article on the conditions among white sharecropper families in the American South. His autobiographical novel, "A Death in the Family" (1957), won the author a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Simone Weil (1909 - 1943) was a French philosopher, activist, and religious searcher, whose death in 1943 was hastened by starvation. Weil published during her lifetime only a few poems and articles. With her posthumous works --16 volumes in all -- Weil has earned a reputation as one of the most original thinkers of her era. T.S. Eliot described her as "a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints." William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963), was an American poet who was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician," wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin; but during his long lifetime, Williams excelled at both. He considered himself a socialist and opponent of capitalism and is probably spinning in his grave at the current state of things, economically and socially. One of his best known poems is an "apology poem" taught to most American children in elementary school called "This Is Just to Say": "I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox / and which / you were probably /saving / for breakfast. / Forgive me / they were delicious / so sweet /and so cold." Dorothy Day (1897 - 1980) was an American journalist and social activist who became most famous for founding, with Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker movement, a nonviolent, pacifist movement which combines direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf. Dorothea Lange (1895 - 1965) was a hugely influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best know for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography, one of Robert Coles' great passions. Erik Erikson (1902 - 1994) was a Danish-German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theories on social development of human beings. He may be most famous for coining the phrase "identity crisis." Erikson's greatest innovation was to postulate not five stages of development, as Freud has done with his psychosexual stages, but eight. Erik Erikson believed that every human being goes through a certain number of stages to reach his or her full development, theorizing eight stages, that a human being goes through from birth to death. Walker Percy (1916 - 1990) was an American southern author best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, the first of which, "The Moviegoer," won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age." His work displays a unique combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith -- all themes of great interest to Coles. Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born September 23, 1949), has long been in Robert Coles' orbit and he once held a concert as a fundraisr for Coles' magazine Double Take (now defunct). Springsteen's most successful studio albums, Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A., epitomize his penchant for finding grandeur in the struggles of daily life in America, and the latter album made him one of the most recognized artists of the 1980s within the United States.

In this rich and illuminating book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author Robert Coles creates a portrait of moral leadership--what it is, and how it is achieved--through stories of people who have led and inspired him: Robert Kennedy, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Erik Erikson, a Boston bus driver, teachers in college, medical school, and elementary school, among others.Coles tells how to be a moral leader and shows how the intervention of one person can change the course of history, as well as influence the day-to-day quality of life in our homes, schools, communities, and nation. We need to "hand one another along" in life, says Coles, quoting his friend Walker Percy, and in Lives of Moral Leadership he explores how each of us can be engaged in a continual and mutual life-giving process of personal and national leadership development. Coles discusses how the actions of the American president affect the way people feel about themselves and the country, and-citing the influence of Shakespeare's Henry V on Robert Kennedy, and of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina on his own mother--explains how reading literature can motivate action and growth. The way in which moral leaders emerge today, and for all time, comes vividly to light in this brilliant book by one of America's finest teachers and writers.

In this searching, vivid inquiry Robert Coles shows how children struggle with questions of moral choice. Bringing to life the voices of children from a rich diversity of backgrounds, he explores their reactions to movies and stories, their moral conduct, their conversations and relationships with friends and family, and their anxieties about themselves and the fate of the world. Whether they are from the poorest classes of Rio de Janeiro or middle-class America, these children lead lives of intense moral awareness.

In this book, Coles explores the concept of idealism and why it necessary to the individual and society.

The Call of Stories presents a study of how listening to stories promotes learning and self-discovery.

This collection of essays assesses the evolving fields of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The topics covered in this updated and expanded edition include the use of Prozac, the nature of white racism, William Styron's Darkness Visible and van Gogh's fever of genius.

"Es 1960 y Ruby Bridges, de seis aänos, se acaba de mudar con su familia de Misisipi a Nueva Orleans buscando una vida mejor. Cuando un juez sentencia que Ruby debe asistir al primer grado de la Escuela Primaria William Frantz, en la que todos son blancos, la niäna debe encarar las furiosas turbas de padres que no quieren que sus hijos vayan a la escuela con ella. Contada con el poderoso estilo narrativo de Robert Coles y dramâaticamente ilustrada por George Ford, la historia de coraje, fe y esperanza de Ruby aâun resuena mâas de 60 aänos despuâes"--

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a Coretta Scott King Award-winning illustrator bring to life the true story of an extraordinary six-year-old who helped shape American history when she became the first African-American sent to first grade in an all white school. This moving picture book captures the courage of a little girl standing alone in the face of racism. Full color.

Does the business of daily living distance us from life's mysteries? Do most Americans value spiritual thinking more as a hobby than as an all-encompassing approach to life? Will the concept of the soul be defunct after the next few generations? Child psychiatrist and best-selling author Robert Coles offers a profound meditation on how secular culture has settled into the hearts and minds of Americans. This book is a sweeping essay on the shift from religious control over Western society to the scientific dominance of the mind. Interwoven into the story is Coles's personal quest for understanding how the sense of the sacred has stood firm in the lives of individuals--both the famous and everyday people whom he has known--even as they have struggled with doubt. As a student, Coles questioned Paul Tillich on the meaning of the "e;secular mind,"e; and his fascination with the perceived opposition between secular and sacred intensified over the years. This book recounts conversations Coles has had with such figures as Anna Freud, Karen Horney, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day. Their words dramatize the frustration and the joy of living in both the secular and sacred realms. Coles masterfully draws on a variety of literary sources that trace the relationship of the sacred and the secular: the stories of Abraham and Moses, the writings of St. Paul, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Darwin, and Freud, and the fiction of George Eliot, Hardy, Meredith, Flannery O'Connor, and Huxley. Ever since biblical times, Coles shows us, the relationship between these two realms has thrived on conflict and accommodation. Coles also notes that psychoanalysis was first viewed as a rival to religion in terms of getting a handle on inner truths. He provocatively demonstrates how psychoanalysis has either been incorporated into the thinking of many religious denominations or become a type of religion in itself. How will people in the next millennium deal with advances in chemistry and neurology? Will these sciences surpass psychoanalysis in controlling how we think and feel? This book is for anyone who has wondered about the fate of the soul and our ability to seek out the sacred in our constantly changing world.

Robert Coles is a psychiatrist with a novelist's sensibilities. "Of course everything I come up with," he says, "novelists have known beforehand." These twenty-three interviews disclose not only an illustrious physician trained in paediatrics and psychoanalysis but also a sage whose compassion for children and suffering seems boundless.

Originally published in 1986 to accompany a retrospective exhibition of the same name organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and has long been out of print. The chronology and personal spirit of Frank's complex career as a photographer and filmmaker are evoked with previously unpublished letters, pictures, reviews and letters.

"Robert Coles first met Dorothy Day over thirty-five years ago when, as a medical student, he worked in one of her Catholic Worker soup kitchens. He remained close to this inspiring and controversial w"

"Robert Cole's penetrating intellectual portrait gives us an entirely new view of Anna Freud. Far from the stereotype of the distant analyst, she was the warm guide, the ego ideal, the "good parent" fo"

This volume explores the question of how to raise a child whose moral intelligence and strong values will be the basis for a balanced and happy life. It shows how character develops from the earliest years, moulded by the often unselfconscious guidance of parents.